Statement on Gannett layoff plans: Congress must take a hard look before helping news execs
Today, executives at Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, announced that they failed to meet their own revenue targets. Investors dumped the stock, and now local journalists and readers must suffer as more layoffs are coming, executives say. Once again, we remind Gannett that it cannot impose these sorts of changes on our members without coming to the bargaining table.
In the meantime, Congress needs to take a long look at companies like Gannett if it’s going to bend federal anti-trust laws and hand a blank check to news executives to help cover up their own corporate mismanagement.
Gannett stands to be one of the greatest beneficiaries of Congress’ proposed Journalism Competition & Preservation Act. The bill would give news publishers an anti-trust exemption to collectively bargain ad revenues with tech giants like Facebook and Google. But there are no guarantees those revenues would go to newsroom jobs instead of disastrous stock buybacks, debt service on high-interest loans or bloated executive compensation packages. The news industry needs help in the form of sound public policy that stimulates newsroom employment — after all, you need journalists to create the journalism that attracts advertisers and paying subscribers.
As a local of The NewsGuild-CWA representing Gannett journalists in Southern California, Arizona and Texas, we have some different ideas to cut costs. Gannett should cancel the $100 million stock buyback it launched in February as a perk to shareholders. The company should stop sacrificing its workforce to service high-interest debt, like its $1.8 billion loan to merge Gannett and GateHouse in 2019. Mike Reed should resign and give back the $7,741,052 in compensation he reported receiving in 2021, and other executives should donate their bloated pay to help save newsroom jobs.
Finally, how many billable hours has Gannett frittered away on labor representatives just to waste our time at the bargaining table? Media Guild of the West only represents three Gannett newsrooms, and right now we have eleven — yes, eleven — unfair labor practice charges pending against Gannett at the National Labor Relations Board. These are the people leading our industry’s efforts to preserve democracy and hold the powerful to account. If the future of journalism is in Gannett's hands, we're all in deep trouble.
###
Media Guild of the West, The NewsGuild-CWA Local 39213, was founded in 2019 and represents unionized journalists and media workers at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix, the Desert Sun in Palm Springs, the Austin American-Statesman, the Los Angeles Times and other news organizations in Southern California, Arizona and Texas.